OK, this issue has come up for me very recently. It appears that
on iPhoneOS IBOutlets are retained, regardless of the presence of
properties. Even worse, in the presence of an assign property the
outlet is still retained. Whatever code is retaining the outlets
never releases them. So it seems that client code must release
all outlets.
Seems to me that the outlets must have a retain count of at least
one when they're unarchived, as though they were alloc'd. It makes
sense that the programmer should have to manually release objects
in dealloc. How else would it happen?
IBOutlets are not necessarily top level objects. Most are simply
views that happen to be in the view hierarchy. There will typically
be one top level object in an iPhone nib. This will be the view
that belongs to UIViewController. It is the UIViewController base
class that loads the nib. As long as it retains that top level view
then all the subviews will also be retained. They should be
released when the UIViewController releases its view outlet.
Right, and view is a property of UIViewController. When you have your
UIViewController release view, that is an example of the programmer
releasing an outlet assigned from IB, which you seem to be arguing
that the programmer shouldn't have to release objects given to it
from IB.
Luke
Exactly - most of the things you're hooking up in IB are your own
objects, those outlets are just instance variables which are being set
for you. It's your object, you have to deal with the lifetimes of the
objects you refer to. I don't see why IB makes any difference, it's just
calling setFoo: on some instance of your class, what you define setFoo
to do is entirely up to you, but if it retains the argument, then you
have to release it one day, in dealloc() would be the natural place.
The iPhone version of nib unarchiving and hookup seemed very consistent
to me, it makes use of properties or setFoo: if you have them, allowing
you to manage objects any way you like.
Perhaps the new @property() syntax makes it easy to forget about object
lifetimes because it does the set/get/change automagically. These days
when I add any property I go right to the dealloc method (and init if I
have one) and ensure I've managed that property before I forget.
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